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About a week ago, I was down at a little shop that sells African products, buying maize (for sadsa). As I was getting out of my car, two women were openly speculating about what kind of disability I had. Why I could use my legs and stand up and that I was 'very young' (I am assuming they said 'to be disabled', but I didn't recognise the words). I didn't recognised those few words because they were speaking in Shona, a language I studied at school because I was deported to Africa by my parents when I was fourteen years old. I understood the rest. I'd learned far more Shona in boarding school (after school ended) at the first public school I attended than I did anywhere else. I learned from the girls that I lived with - at my first school, there were only four white girls. The Black girls treated me kindly, for the most part, but cautiously, because I was Australian but still white. At home on the farm, people spoke Chilapalapa - a language my godmot…

I went to sleep thinking of homelessness, and I woke after having one
of those dreams which was startling in its clarity. It was part
memory, part fantasy, and it was about sleeping rough.

Most people know that I was deported to Africa by my parents (lol) for
being a naughty teenager. Some might not know that I compulsively ran
away before that happened - I packed my bags and left, over and over
again. Some of that experience involved sleeping on the streets, which
fills me with horror now to think about how unsafe it would have been
for a teenaged kid.

Except it wasn't. There was a real
community amongst the homelessness community and most people watched out
for we young folk. There was Dan the Hotdog Man, who fed us at any
time (not just at the end of the day or night, when we would tour the
city's bain maries.). The places to sleep were all collective places - I
don't remember now the names of the other children, but I do remember
one had a job selling …

Dear non-disabled people -
Silencing disabled people is oppression. It relieves them of whatever
limited 'power' has been granted to them in the first place. That
limited power has usually been fought for by disabled people themselves. If you silence disabled people, you are not 'allies', no matter
what you purport to say or do. You are not an advocate. You are not a
friend. You are part of the problem. Silencing. It's a good idea to think about why you're doing this. Keep this quote in mind.
'When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar,
you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.' - George R.R. Martin
Silencing is not confined just to disabled people - Black and First
Nations people and other marginalised groups also experience this
treatment at the hands of members of dominant groups who want to silence
people and quash dissent. We disabled people are tired
of being spoken for whe…

It is hard to be proud in the face of oppression and discrimination,
but it is harder when your culture is almost wholly comprised on stories
based around those things.

Stories create culture. The
response to the story makes it narrative, and it informs the way people
behave. Our public narratives are all created by non disabled people -
inspiration and charity and tragedy, and our private narratives are
concealed by our diversity.

Even stories which should belong to us have been appropriated by non
disabled people as inspiration porn. We're objectified every day
because of it. And even stories that reflect pride are often based on
protest. Although it is wonderful being part of a community who are
fighting for their rights, there is nothing beautiful about the
desperate struggle to stay out of nursing homes or have good health care
or access or just to be part of the world.

All
those people who rightly condemn the nationalist fools shouting about
integration. Integration, which happens when people are forced to give
up their identity and culture and language in order to adopt a country
or culture not of their own.

The same condemning people who tut
tut over seventy years of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from
their families. Those stolen children were sent to missions and
institutions where they were taught to reject their heritage and their
language and become 'assimilated' into white society.

And yet
those people are the same people who approve of ABA, the practice of
training autistic children to be as non-autistic as we can possibly make
them. Eye contact, no stimming, it's weird and abhorrent otherwise,
our native practices. What our neurology dictates to them is wrong,
because our neurology is not like theirs. They approve of the idea that
'some disabled people are too disabled to live in the communi…